Japanese Oral History of World War II

Facing the darkness and speaking out for the true history, hundreds of Japanese witnesses disclosed their bloody and cruel war experiences for the first time. During World War II, Japan caused serious disasters to the Asia-Pacific region, and the trauma continues to this day. However, Japanese officials have avoided talking about the origin, process, cost and consequences of the war from beginning to end, and have never expressed any apology. Why is this so? On the contrary, when the Japanese civilians who were dragged into the abyss of the war looked back on the war decades later, the words they used more often were unspeakable and unbearable to face? This book can be called a groundbreaking oral history. The famous Western historians Theodore F. Cook and his wife tried to reconstruct the full picture of the war by interviewing hundreds of Japanese witnesses of the war and referring to many unpublished letters, wills, diaries, military notes, government archives, etc., And for the first time disclosed the ambivalent mentality of today's Japanese when recalling "World War II". There are many interviewees in this book, ranging from diplomats to kamikaze members, Unit 731 military doctors, prisoner of war supervisors, Chinese invaders and other war criminals, from nuclear bomb victims to journalists, students, comfort women, traders in China, painters, etc. They all told the secret and desperate nightmare from their own perspectives: Unit 731 in The truth about China's in vivo experiments; the specific details of poison gas warfare in China; the details of humane destruction massacres represented by the Nanjing Massacre; the humiliation of Japanese and Korean comfort women; the mental journey of kamikaze members who committed suicide to attack the Allied forces; the Allied forces approached, and the details of civilians killing each other under the propaganda of the authorities;... These vivid individual experiences intuitively show how the war conflict that began with the war of aggression against China brutally destroyed the tragedy of Southeast Asian people, including Japanese civilians, and presented the huge contradiction between Japan's official views on the war and folk oral accounts. The irrational nightmare of slaughter, the unbearable depravity and fear.